Roads Taken, Not Taken and Halted: A Brief Review of the American Regulations Regarding Youth Social Media Use

Concern continues to grow over social media design: endless scrolling, personalised algorithms and addictive features increasingly compete for the users’ attention, facilitating the risk of harm. In response, new regulations are being proposed at both national and international levels. This article examines how US state law-makers – among the first to take action – have attempted to regulate the impact of social media on children’s mental health, following the US Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. To conduct this review, Bill texts from 37 states have been chosen, collected and reviewed. Subsequently, the proposed measures are evaluated under the theory of placebo policies to further assess the potential disparities between their declared impact, their consequences and the law-makers’ intention behind their introduction. Concluding that some measures are well researched while others rely mostly on their emotional content, this analysis hopes to increase the theoretical understanding of these regulatory efforts and to serve as a knowledge base for other jurisdictions.